The Impressionist Era

4 Pages 886 Words

The invention of the still photograph changed a lot of things. Artists were no longer limited to landscapes and portraits. They started to develop their inner vision. These individual movements progressed from Classical art to Romanticism to Realism to Impressionism to Abstraction; the list goes on. One interesting area of art includes the Impressionistic era. This time period ranged from 1870 to 1890.
In just a short 20 years, the main artists moved from staid landscapes to expressing their inner views in short expressive brush strokes to changing the colors from the naturalistic color schemes of past works. This era actually started from a rejection. A group of artists whose work was declined for the 1873 Salon show organized an independent exhibition of their work (Preble 387). They began to emulate the camera using various camera abilities, namely the rendition of light on the subject matter and the camera's final print as a "snapshot" on canvas.
Claude Monet lived from 1840 to 1926. In 1858, he met Eugene Boudin who introduced him to outdoor paintings. Monet thought Boudin lost a few marbles, but once he attempted this new way of attaining subject matter, he adapted it to his own use. With the invention of the still photograph, he became enthralled with the accurate recording of natural light, atmosphere and color (Biography.com). His painting: Impression: Sunrise, inspired a hostile newspaper reporter to call all the artists in this rogue exhibition: Impressionists. Monet uses impressionism as an illusionistic style. His renditions were greatly different from the old masters’ landscapes. Because of his enthusiasm with the reaction of light, his paintings would gain larger, bolder brush strokes as he attempted to catch "A moment of time." MSN Encarta states: This technique of bright, unmixed colors in quick strokes would become the hallmark of impressionism.
According the Art Institute of Chicago’s website, ...